


If I Knew Where Cover Was

by ninety6tears



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: (Not That Kind Of) Role-Playing, Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-18 23:00:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1446016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/pseuds/ninety6tears
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassie does her best Lexie. Lexie does her best Cassie. Rob tries to do his worst. Everyone has always had a few bluffs to be called, but Maddox needs no reminder of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Knew Where Cover Was

**Author's Note:**

> Though this is an AU it doesn't actually tinker very much with the canon events; it jumps around a lot, skirting through _In the Woods_ up to somewhere at the tail end of _The Likeness_. You could probably keep up having read TL and not ITW, but not vice versa.

Not his area: He had very limited knowledge of whatever protocol there might be for sweeping up the debris of old undercover ops, but from the start the most rational assumption seemed to be that she was in some kind of trouble, that she'd run into some old friends from when she was working up drug dealers. People who still had no idea who she really was but might have had a risky chance of bringing her up to somebody who did. Maybe she didn't have her moped or any way of getting out of there fast enough and it just happened to be at the diner where he was stalling his return home for the night over coffee and a newspaper, where he was the chance she had to take.

He had thought there was someone in the next booth—from where he'd peripherally registered the mostly silent group with books cracked open—who’d muttered for some small favor and called someone Lexie. He'd noticed because the name tucked him out of his coffee for only a second, in the way one reacts to any name that holds one or two threads of memory.

As if on cue, the woman walked out of his flicker of nostalgia and right up to him, and he didn't have time to wonder why she'd happened to be sitting there or where this had started.

"Can you tell me where a girl could buy loose tobacco without walking a mile from here?" She was leaning in all friendly and presumptuous, one elbow against the tall wall of his opposite booth. She had a shorter haircut now, the curls sleeked tighter to her head. "It's a surprise to cheer up a real Mister Serious, if you're having a hard time picturing me with a pipe."

Their eyes met. Rob could only respond to his bafflement by staring her down for a moment, coming to his explanation in a clinical way while something came over her like she was stiffening to stand her ground against a breeze. (Later, he would understand the epiphany: the recognition of being recognized.)

He almost mouthed, _What is it?_ Instead he said, "Sure, there's one around a couple corners, but...well, I can never remember street names."

"Do you want to give me a lift there?" she asked, a restless motion in her shoulders and teasing, "Or do I need to find you a map?"

He gave realism's pause of hesitation at her leap of asking his prop of a stranger for a ride; then he gave a good-natured sigh. "Well, why not. I was just on my way out."

"Finish that if you want."

"It's my third cup anyway," he said, shrugging into his jacket as he stood. She started to button up a very simple brown coat—he'd never seen it on her before—and managed barely a backward glance at the group as they were heading out. He decided it was best not to snoop a look back at her table, but noticed her mouthing something across the distance at one of them before they were filling the doorway into the cold together.

"You alright?" he muttered stiffly.

A hesitation pulled into her finally, and he wondered if that was it for any words between them. Then she just gave a shudder in the cold air and said, "Thanks. I was dying to get out of there."

He couldn't start to wonder where this was going. "That's obvious enough...It didn't seem like a very rough group."

"That's not the problem," she replied quickly, but didn't say anything more. He expected at least some explanation to confirm his assumptions, but she seemed to understand what he'd already worked out. He accepted, with a frowning bend in his mind, that the rest wasn't really his business.

At his car she stopped a little abruptly, hesitating. "Is it a good idea to wait for a cab?" he asked after a couple seconds, noticing how tired his own voice sounded, how tired this was all going to make him.

"No. I mean..." Moving to get in with this weird high-heeled-looking walk, she just said, "Thank you." He thought, it was just some trick of the surreal electricity of all of this, that her voice seemed a little bit reedier, a little too sweet.

"You don't need me to run you by somebody's office or anything?" he asked after a hesitation when they were both in the car. "I mean, if you need to report to somebody..."

She cracked down the window, looking away from him, then must have remembered she didn't have any cigarettes because she immediately flicked it back up. "No, I can take care of that tomorrow."

They'd driven in silence for a few minutes when he finally wordlessly offered her a cigarette. She declined, and it was almost in a polite rather than dismissive way, which was the strange part. The fact was too gravitationally obvious to need to be pondered, but also was too justified in its alienation of him to quite send up a warning light in his head: Something about her was all wrong.

After another quiet kilometer he was beginning to fantasize about pulling over to the shoulder and having a good crisis with her right here in the car, telling her that he was sorry about everything until she came to her senses and spat right back out into the wet street, found another ride home, chopped off even more of her hair for good measure, and thought about him even less. He was so busy contemplating whether it would be worse if she poleaxed him or managed to say nothing at all, he was startled out of it with the last question he could have possibly expected to hear coming from his left.

"Are we going to yours then?"

For some reason all he could feel was irritated. They had hardly ever spent time at his apartment. Fucking hell and sad almighties, why would they now? "What?"

"My house is too far. I've moved, you know, I'm not on campus anymore."

" _Campus_?" Rob finally blinked and sat back in the car seat a bit as he slowed them to a stop at a red light. He squinted into the intersection for a tick before looking squarely at her, at her eyes matching him from under those too-short bangs. The way she was holding her hands on her lap. After a short moment, his mouth went crookedly almost to a smile. "I get it."

She innocently said, "What?"

"I help you out and I get Lexie Madison, then?"

He felt like he sensed a small motion of relief, despite the "What are _you_ on about now?" she delivered as she sank back into the seat a bit, as if that was only playing with him. The madness of all this hit him like a visceral taunt, as if he could feel with no question that she'd thrown down some kind of challenge even though he had no idea what she was playing at yet. He almost would have asked, _Is there somebody at your flat you don't want seeing me drop you off?_ He supposed it was probably Sam. But he felt like questioning any of it would ruin the game somehow.

"You want to fuck me about, fine," he finally said. "I'll play."

He took the next turn in an abrupt spin and drove them both to his apartment.

 

There was that Christmas party the department got to have on a dinner cruise all the way out in Galway because of somebody’s friendly connection to the head waiter, when Cassie wore that velvety black dress mostly for the hell of it. For a long time after it remained one of those nights that she didn't remember in so much detail but always purred with a rich texture in her mind.

Given that a lot of their amusement with each other had been wrapped up in the shared lie of posing her cousin as a boyfriend, that and much more of it had taken on the most serenely secretive tingle that made getting on in the crowds more fun than it would have otherwise been. She stuck with Gerry for an hour or so, muttering a bunch of family talk, but when she’d eventually found Rob up above, leaning on a banister and looking out at the dark waves, she had been reminded for some reason of children who meet up in secret hollows between trees.

He asked her how good a liar her cousin Gerry was; she said, "Well, he's apparently a fast learner" and they both laughed as she recounted how easily he’d told a story that happened when the two of them went to a rugby game together and twisted it as their first date.

Still sniggering at the mild perversity of the lie, Rob said, "At least the two of you don't look alike."

She shook her head. "I don't look like anyone in my family, really," she said, pinching an ice cube out of the melting remains of his drink.

"Get a look at you," he said, acknowledging the dress for the first time that night, and she did some exaggerated showing-off motion before she hiked up the top a bit higher, not used to going strapless. "Where'd you have that thing hiding?"

"It's actually a Lexie dress." She was only just remembering, "This guy asked me out to a nice restaurant—that’s a long story in itself—and I didn't really have anything that I thought she would wear."

He'd gone from scrunching his eyes to a look of understanding. "Oh, 'Lexie' was..."

"My alias, yeah. Lexie Madison."

He threw his spent cigarette into the water.

"You're not supposed to do that," she teased. "'We keep our ocean clean,' didn't you see the sign?"

He did a petulant half-sneer. "What was she like?"

"Who?...Oh, my cover." She looked vaguely out over the ocean and laughed. "You talk about it like she's some dead girl."

"In a way she kind of is," he said with a shrug.

"No, you make it sound a little too romantic. She was..." She let her eyes roll up to the stars. "Stupid in some ways. Smart in other ways. She was as smart as we needed her to be."

"So did you give her this whole different personality, all the trimmings?"

She shrugged. "I guess...I definitely wasn't myself."

"Like if I asked you to do Lexie Madison right now..."

"Oh, _no_. No, I'm not that drunk."

He let out a small sound of amusement as he was tucking a cigarette between his lips. "Why, what's wrong?"

"I don't like to...I just..." She gave a wobbly motion with her hand. Even this part of undercover was an awkward spot in her mind.

"What if I offered to buy her a drink?"

"Oh, I think she had better taste than that," Cassie said with a wicked grin, her mood already bouncing back a bit.

Doing offended as he gave a little kick to her foot, Rob furrowed his brows. Normally he'd give back a similar dig, but he said, "When I say I want to buy a girl a drink, I mean buy her a drink."

She wanted to say "Bullshit, Rob," but it wasn't in the spirit of the farce, or of something else entirely her mind didn't want to name.

"Oh, yeah?" With a thoughtful spell of sighing, she looked down for a second. Her eyes went to the black horizon, then back. "What's your name, then?"

His eyes were bright above a small smile. "It's Rob. What do you like from the bar?"

As Lexie she'd always said, "Anything that matches my eyes," so she said it then while looking away, leaving it with her lips pressed together, aloof.

She couldn't see but could feel the amused grin on his face. "Rocks?"

Distracted pause: "Yeah, whatever."

 

Heather had gone to bed when they came through the door together, Rob deflating his umbrella and letting it fall to the corner. When he turned away from latching the door she was glancing back from the direction of the little kitchen, and for a second they just looked at each other.

"My room," he decided simply. She knew Heather; she'd have to understand. In response, she only crooked up one side of her mouth and nodded.

She followed him down the short hall and into the bedroom. He turned on the lamp and slid out his desk chair, expecting her to take it, but she sat down on the bed slowly, looking sure but somehow small. Her hair was clinging from the drizzle outside and a couple of her fingers slicked a couple locks of that tight cap off of her forehead, wrinkling her mouth at some distracted thought. Then she had a kind of mild start and looked at him. "...Well," was all she said.

He sat down backwards in the chair, setting his arms over it. "So, _Lexie_. How are things?"

Her look in response was slow, too cautious. He felt another kick of irritation.

"Look, you acted like you want to just put things behind us for right now, and _you_ chose to come over, it's not like I'm trying to—"

"Right. I'm sorry," she interrupted, jittery and then shrugging. In a sudden slightly bizarre shift, she put an act back up. "It's funny running into you. But they say Dublin is really small that way."

He settled down in his chair, but something in his attention was trained very closely on her. "I guess it was inevitable."

She gave a good-natured scoff; he smiled back.

"You want a drink? I've only got a couple things, you know. For emergencies."

He stood up, hearing her say, "If you'd like to consider this an emergency, alright."

"I'm afraid my go-to is still vodka."

"All about the subtle pleasures as always." Her eyes rocked up to his, as if checking how welcome the weak dig was. His look gave it a score of harmlessly annoying. She shrugged. "Whatever you're having. Vodka's fine."

He was setting down two shot glasses from the drawer in his desk. He poked in her direction the less oft-used souvenir glass that had its logo smudged off, poured them both a shot.

He wasn't sure why he sat down on the bed next to her instead of taking the chair again, maybe just out of the pact of recklessness that she'd set down. When he did her shoulder met his comfortably and her hand lifted for a toast.

After a flinch of almost not thinking to say it, he said, "Sorry, it doesn't match your eyes."

She looked at her shot. "Oh, did you lose it?"

"Lose what?"

A twitch in her expression and then right back to loose, relaxed: "You meant the other glass, right?" She furrowed her brows and laughed, as if he was the one not making sense.

Rob looked into those eyes, perfect familiar brown, for too much of a moment, a handful of seconds that crawled and clawed like something attempting to escape. He said, "Nevermind."

He felt like there had been some insane but undeniable click, or something like the realization of an aimed gun peering at him from across the room. He tapped his glass against hers with a soft smirk and drank down the quick burn, readying and reckless.

Twisting forward, he set the shot glass on the desk with a pronounced tap and then turned back to her, his thoughts powering forward. As if there was virtually nothing else he could do, he reached for her chin, turned her face into him and kissed her.

It was short and gentle, and he let their foreheads stay propped together for a few seconds afterward. Her eyes looked back, unwavering. This close, her breath smelled like some kind of spiced tea, the rest of her a pleasant breezy low, like grass reeds, maybe good, maybe wrong. He kissed her again. She kissed back, fully and purposefully. After only a short moment, not long enough for him to get his spinning head caught up, she pulled his hand onto her lap, between her thighs.

His eyes looked down and fixed on his hand as if he was disconnected from it, barely feeling her mouth as it was pecking along his jaw, her breath almost loud at his ear. He pulled back, getting up on his knees to shift and shrug out of his coat. She slipped her body down so that her legs were on either side of one of his, latching to him and then holding a quietly flirty pondering finger at her mouth before she coiled up and touched his belt, beginning very slowly to undo it.

"Wait," he commanded softly. She looked up at him from under her lashes. He said, "Take off your blouse."

Compliantly but slowly she lay back under him and started with the top button, leisurely undoing every one. Without parting the sides of her top, she fingered somewhere as if to undo her bra as well, but his mind flitted.

"Stop." Without thinking, he'd perched his hand just below the line of the top of her pants, barely even touching, his eyes fixed above it where the cotton fabric still lay. "Open your shirt."

Interpreting this playfully, she let one of her hands roam slowly down herself. The easy sigh she was breathing out seemed to fill the entire room, and he felt like an icy draft was cruelly setting his body to a tension that stopped his heart. And then finally the touch slid up to part the fabric and expose the paleness of her torso, her shape like gauze laid in a tandem from the bottom of her ribs to around the hips, and even though he'd already known it wouldn’t be there, he had to pass a few fingers sparingly over the skin to simply feel the utterly, offensively immaculate surface beneath his hand.

She was tugging him down on top of her, and for a moment as he came very close to fully deciding this had to be some fucked up hallucination, he let her, he pushed his mouth against hers and let her fumble around underneath him, but then he muttered, "I'm sorry," just before he sat back and had one of the cuffs from his coat pocket wrapped in a click around her wrist.

He could feel her entire body going cold the very second she turned her head and understood, before she tried to launch for the door. He was already ready for her to break for it and locked onto her arms easily enough, forced her back into sitting on the bed and wrapped the other handcuff around a thick bar on his bed frame, all the while rapidly saying, "I'm sorry, but if you make enough noise to wake up my flatmate I'm going to get a warrant to run you in on suspicion of identity fraud _without_ giving you a chance to explain yourself, so _stop_. Calm _down_."

Her panic was impressive, more frantic than on anyone he'd seen get the news before. It was hardly unusual to be terrified of the conviction, but something was weird in the way it didn't seem to be his words as much as the cuffs, the binding of her body to something only yet figurative but solidly represented, that made the air stir with how fast her heart must have been racing. She was staring with simple and absolute despair at her trapped arm.

Finally she stammered, "Can you really cuff me if you aren't arresting me yet?"

"Easily. In fact what you were just trying to do could be considered sexual assault, assuming I could convince a jury that you were fully aware that I thought you were someone else, so, I have the right to consider you a potential physical threat and put you in restraint." He sat down in the chair again.

"I'm sorry," she gulped, looking nauseated. "I'm sorry, please, _please_ let me go, I _can't_ go to prison..."

The reaction was bizarre to witness; it was so far from any shakiness he could even imagine in Cassie that the effect was as if he were in the presence of some over-acted prank. He realized that his hands were trembling and possibly had been for quite a while now; he couldn't imagine ever resenting anyone so deeply for simply existing, and the fact that this woman was his responsibility and in his fucking bedroom was about as sharply bizarre as it could get.

"You need to let me go," she said through her teeth. "Please. You need to let me go."

Rob set his elbow on his desk in a lean, staring at her. "Do you know my name?"

"How— _How_ would I know your name?" she demanded. "She's just some girl who looks like me, I don't even know _her_ name, but I didn't do anything wrong..."

"Keep it down. So you're aware that it's an alias, then?" He cocked an eyebrow. "Did you know that from the start?"

"Why would I tell you that?"

"Because telling me the truth is the only chance you've got."

"Trying to scare me with that sexual assault thing?" she said, her mind gnawing backwards, and she mockingly demanded, "Are you even allowed to snog _suspects_?"

"How are you going to prove that I began to suspect you were not who you said you were prior to seeing that you are missing a scar that belongs to the person whose identity you stole?"

His gaze flicked briefly to indicate her stomach, and she looked down at herself angrily; her state of bareness didn't even seem to bother her until then. To no one, she exclaimed, "Oh, for fuck _sakes_."

"If you're curious: I was halfway to figuring out something was off the moment she seemed to actually feel like talking to me. Considering that, you actually did alright."

"Well, thank you very much," she said archly, looking around his room.

She didn't react in any way to the pause in discourse as he took the moment to look at her and then look more; he flipped the overhead light on and she blinked, Cassie's eyes a shout of a ghost under the slight shade of her bangs. He took a few steps back into the orbit of her furious anxiety, and his arm reached out hesitantly. "Look, could I...? I just..."

When she didn't protest, his fingers passed over her forehead, barely touching it, just raising the identical gloss of dark waves up to the hairline. He squinted at her until her left hand pushed his arm back, the action more pestered than anything else. She demanded, "What are you doing?"

He sighed, feeling stupid. "I just thought...surgical scars..."

She let out a high but dark little laugh. "I'd check her for the same thing if I got the chance."

"...I had to look," he stammered, still swerving hard with this whole fucking acid trip. He suddenly decided he needed a moment to get his head together. "Alright, I'm going to go take a walk. One cigarette. So I'm going to trust you to be quiet while I'm gone. God knows why, but there it is."

She scoffed, and something about it set him off a bit.

"Look, the person that I thought you were, I haven't spoken to in a long time. And I'm not going to ask you to appreciate what that means, but sit tight and shut the fuck up, read a book, don't make my night even worse than it is and I might consider not arresting you."

Her eyes kept over the floor for the time it took him to get his coat on and leave the room.

 

Rob brought her a whisky with coke, holding it up to her face in an examining squint.

"Ah, good job, boy," she said, wrapping her fingers around the glass, but then setting it down, reminding herself how many drinks she'd already had downstairs. It was in character: Lexie had been one of those obnoxious types who only flirted with the booze in her hand, petting it with a sip now and then, which had been helpful at the time; Cassie didn't grow out of being a bit of a lightweight until some time after Undercover.

She cocked an eyebrow at Rob: "What did you say you do, again?"

"I didn't say." He shrugged as he took a seat on one of the benches along the deck. The wind off the sea popped up some of his hair for a couple seconds. She stepped in a little closer but didn't sit down.

"...You're not a cop, are you?"

He scoffed. "What if I was?"

"Oh God, you _are_." She let out a little grunt. "I thought you looked like one, I really did."

"What kind of cop do I look like?"

"A bad one if I'm lucky."

He almost broke face, laughing lowly. "Bad like _incompetent_? Or..."

"Yes, I'm actually worried that you're a decent cop because I've done something wrong," she said with a rather bratty wall of sarcasm. "I'm not a fan of the guards, is all. One of them frisked my friend for no good reason when she was just waiting in the lot at the Boots." Semi-true story; her old pal Vicky always smelled like hash in those days.

"There must have been some reason."

"Boredom's a reason."

"Should I just fuck off now?" he asked with a laugh. "Maybe try to convince you you looked like the badge bunny type and that I actually work at the hardware store?"

She sighed, smudging down the attitude a bit, and then looked him over and smiled, "No, actually, I don't want you to fuck off. You look like a nice one."

"Alright. Lexie, was it?" His crooked smile made her wonder if he was playing some type of cover here too: She'd only seen that particular look in the interview room. "What do you like to do with nice guys?"

"Hang on, here," she said, her hips and shoulders making a shrugging swish of motion as she turned in more to face him. "Aren't you a little old for me?"

"What are you, mid-twenties? If you keep stalling, I'm going to consider myself rejected."

"Shop's closing, huh?"

"It's your shop, love,” he said, bluntly yet also sniggering a bit.

" _Ooh_ ," she said, doing a doe-eyed spurned expression, more in response to his put-upon tone than the words. "You're maybe not a nice man."

Rob looked down at her, bit his lip very briefly, then shook his head. “Depends on what you mean by nice, I think.”

Now she cocked a considering eyebrow, her head going into a slow rocking of consideration. Then she took a couple steps back, leaned down enough to remove her shoes so that she was barefoot on the deck. "You like to dance?" she asked.

Something about the question knocked Rob off of his mark. He swallowed and seemed close to shaking his head, but then said, "Sometimes."

Heels dangling from her fingers by the straps, she adjusted her dress with the other hand. "Too bad," she said, and walked away.

 

He hesitated after he slid his key into the lock back at the apartment, as if steeling himself for some heavy interview (and maybe he was). He let out a stiff breath, turned the key and stepped inside.

In his room she was sitting calmly now, her free hand rested on her thigh and her eyes in the middle of searching almost patiently over the surroundings. She'd managed to get her clothes back in order. He shut the door behind him and leaned against the wall several feet away from her. Sighing, he finally said, "I owe you an apology."

She looked at him, eyes widened a little smartly. His hand motioned toward the handcuffs.

"I hope I didn't give you a shock; I kind of took for granted you'd have already realized I was a cop. But when I took those out you could have thought I was just some kind of pervert."

"No worries," she returned, "I assumed both."

"Ah," he scoffed, finding a wry smile as he took his coat off again, tossing it over the back of his chair. "I can see you've calmed down a little bit."

"Yeah, well, I did some thinking."

"Hmm." He was trying not to look at her, then trying to get a closer look. His mind still wouldn't completely accept her.

With a shrug she declared, "I've decided that you're not going to arrest me."

He met her eyes for a beat. "And how do you figure that?"

She only gave him a mysterious little smile, and he scoffed again.

"Alright." He sat down in the chair. He noticed with a small blip of fascination that her shot was sitting still full on the desk; she'd tucked it behind her in some sleight while he was drinking his. "Why don't you start with telling me your real name?"

"Lexie Madison," she said, and pressed her lips together, looking at the far wall next to his window.

"You think I'm going to let you go if you keep fucking around?"

She said nothing.

"How did you discover that name?" Rob tried. "Did you see her somewhere and somehow track down her identity? Did you realize some other way that you had a ringer running around?"

She sat there and bobbed one of her feet. He made sure not to fidget himself.

"How did you know it was an undercover handle?"

"Did I say I knew that it was?"

He sat back, agitated.

She slowly swiveled her head back to look at him. "Is it really true that I'm only in trouble if it can be proven I took the identity with some intent to steal with it?"

"The general definition of identity theft doesn't only cover doing it for money, actually, but if you knew the name wasn't real to begin with, that might make things easier on you." Rob did a tilt of his head. "I don't really know how you're going to make that case, but it's not my area anyway."

"What is your area?"

He’d taken out his lighter just to switch at it a couple times before abruptly putting it back; it drove him crazy that he couldn’t smoke in his own place. "Murder. Though these days it's mostly resisting the urge to murder my colleagues."

She gave him a half-smile, still as calm as when he'd walked in.

"Really, why do you think I'm not going to arrest you?" His eyes searched over her, and then strayed to the bed in a now dismayed recollection of earlier events. "Would you have really gone all the way with me just to keep up with the show?...You were really going to, weren't you?"

Something guarded came over her, and he made a dismissive gesture.

"Forget that bollocks about virtue. I mean that you were willing to do it."

"So?"

"Do you have an idea I'm not going to bring you in because I want to sleep with you?"

"Oh, no." She wrinkled her nose. "What's the big deal about almost getting it anyway? I'm sure you wouldn't have been bad."

He looked at her for a long time, feeling as if he'd just plucked something out of her, some trait she didn’t understand to be as important as it was. "Okay, so you didn't think there was any profit in the identity, then why did you take it? Just because it was there?"

She gave him a grin, her eyes still a little solemn. As if maybe he was just beginning to get something.

"Tell me."

"What do you think it would feel like? To come across this person who's literally your double, who not only exists in the first place but is right there in your corner of the world just waiting for you to bump into them...And then the name was an alias. Like a gown tailored by my fairy godmother. All I had to do was put it on." She shook her head at herself a little, then looked closely at him. "...No. I guess I can't expect you to understand."

"But to have to go poking around in it..." Rob considered her, his mouth twisting thoughtfully, and he said with sure satisfaction, "This wasn't the first time you set up shop." He could see her clamping down again and said, "This is all off the record, alright?"

"You're a cop, cops lie all the time."

"You don't have much of a choice about trusting me, is the thing. I'm giving _you_ a fair bit of trust if I decide to believe that you've been skirting around snagging fake IDs here and there just because you felt like it, so maybe you should give me a reason why."

"I didn't 'just feel like it.'"

"Are you running from somebody? You're in some kind of trouble?"

But he knew, somehow, that wasn't it. And he also knew, looking at the sly little shake of her head, that she was maybe too sealed into the act to even be able to give him the answer.

They sat for what seemed like a very long time, while he tried to size her up, tried to think of a single thing he was willing to hold over her that could actually work. Her every responding glance seemed to waylay him somehow until he almost got a sense of dizzy hypnosis just waiting by the minute for her to get back to being nervous. The only thing that had become clear was that whatever she was doing, it was seamless.

"Have you ever considered a career in law enforcement?" he asked dryly.

The sardonic turn made her blink, but she said—truthfully, he thought—and smoothly, "I've considered everything."

Another moment went by. Rob slowly said, "What I don't get...is why you didn't run."

She blinked innocently. "Say what?"

"When you realized I recognized you. Or thought I did. I hardly forced you to get in the car, and you could have turned right around in the diner, at least seen if I didn't try to go after you."

"It's happened several times before. Sometimes I've used the opportunity to chuck off some tips on where she hangs out, whether she's still in town...We already don't go out much, but it's good to know the places to avoid. I was beginning to wonder how some liberal arts student had picked up all these acquaintances. But the third time it happened, it was some kid I saw close to the park. She just waved at me and shouted from across the street, 'Afternoon, detective!' when I was on my way to the bookstore. I about lost it when I realized how much it explained. Cops meet a lot of people, right? It could have been anybody's kid with a case of hero worship for an acquaintance of their parent's. And everything I'd learned about this Lexie was exactly what a cop might need some dope pusher to be...But when did your double take at me I didn't really think you looked like a cop, so I thought I'd see where it would lead; by the time I realized maybe you were one, when we were in the car, it was too late to turn tail."

"It wasn't. You had to sense things were tenuous enough, you could have had second thoughts at any minute and it would have made perfect sense to me."

"Well, I realize that _now_."

He shook his head. "You're obviously good at this. So what was the reason?"

For a moment she looked chagrined in a way that looked so _young_ that he almost had to bite back the impulse to pat her knee and say, _I promise I won't laugh_. "...I was curious," she said.

For just a second his laugh was pure and not cruel. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess you would be."

Another small moment ticked by, Rob scratching at his stubble until something in him resigned.

With a small aggravated noise, he started to lean up. "Let's go."

She tensed up all over again, opening her mouth as if to start pleading.

He paused when he was about to key off the cuffs. When he did, he let her hand go instead of detaching them from the bedpost. He said, "I'll give you a lift home."

She looked down at her freed wrist, dazed. Then she asked him, "Why?"

"Because," he said in a reflectively aggravated tone, "you can’t completely understand what I mean, but that name you're carting around isn't mine any more than it's yours. This mess isn't her fault, but it goes back to her, and I don't know if she'd want my hands on it. Take this as a warning to stay well hidden or else get the hell away from Dublin, because something like this was bound to happen sooner or later."

She accepted this with less confusion than he would have expected, but was still a little too stunned to rise from the bed.

He was reaching for his coat, but hesitated. "I still wouldn't mind knowing your reason." He doubted he could get it now; he had nothing to hold over her.

She must have decided she owed him. "Why I do what I do? Or why I figured you would let me go?"

"Do I only get one?"

She twisted her mouth, too high on her sudden victory and stifling it as gracelessly as a child being handed some exception to the rule. God, she was like a prank gift: in a lot of ways exactly the type of woman he used to think he wanted, all wrapped up in the one he'd thrown away.

He asked, "Why did you expect me to let you go?" This made her look down at her feet, sighing and suddenly somber again, and she took a while to speak.

"Because I was going to tell you..." She had to let out a breath first, and her nervous smile looked shell-shocked. "I'm pregnant."

There was a burning slice of the words in her little voice; it was clear to him she hadn't said it out loud before. The fact kicked him right in the chest, for reasons that tingled treacherously at the edges of his thoughts as he looked her up and down. "Are you lying?"

"No."

The room seemed to tilt with him as he glanced over again at her untouched drink.

Her eyebrows raised. "To tell you the truth, the booze shouldn't have mattered. I didn't think I was going to hold onto it. But then...you put that handcuff on me. And I don't know...This voice in my head just started screaming about how I was supposed to stick with it this time."

After a moment of feeling a little bit dizzy, he scrubbed a hand over his mouth and simply nodded.

"So that's it," she said, shrugging. "Even now, with you deciding to let me go, it feels like I was somehow coming up to this all along."

"What do you mean, the baby? The name?"

Her lips curved up, and there was a complication to her unabashed happiness that should have been impossible: as if she knew how naive she was, how blissfully she was enjoying what would be the very last flowering of this game she liked to play. "All of it."

He could have said something cynical about that. But all he could do was put his coat back on yet again, and let her believe it.

All of a sudden he felt incredibly tired, and very sad. "Congratulations," he muttered as he fished his keys out of his pocket.

 

She'd gone back over to Gerry for a while, somebody swaying her into another refill of the whisky as she gave her opinions on what his wife wanted to name the kid they had coming. Finally when she was too tired for any more polite conversation with the older veteran officers, she wondered where Rob had gotten off to and wandered back to where she'd left him on the deck. The ship had docked several minutes ago, but people were still leaving in a slow leak. Rob hadn't been on the upper deck after all, but he found her there a minute after she'd given up on him.

"One more try," he said, sliding another drink to her when he found her leaning on the side of the boat again.

She cocked an eyebrow at him and the scotch. The thick bronze slurring around the bottom of the glass was barely more than a shot. She didn't really want more to drink, but Lexie's puppet voice, apparently still alive somewhere in her head, piped up and made her hand take it from him and then swallow it all down at once, handing the glass back in a pert motion. She cleared her throat, and in a matter-of-fact way, looped her arm around his and said, "Thank you, officer."

He gave a relaxed smirk. "Why give me all the hard time?"

"Easy enough time if I'm worth the trouble," she said, trying for a cold smile.

"Of course.” He then asked in a dry drawl, “How old are you again?"

She gave a tilt of her head instead of scoffing, a sort of _nuh-uh_. "I never said."

"That's right, you didn't." Rob looked down for a relaxed hesitation, not giving away a flicker of familiarity, letting the setting jostle into its pretense. A part of her couldn't believe they were still keeping up with this.

There was no one else outside with them now, nothing but the breeze which was itself a stranger in this ongoing charade that was becoming increasingly wild and more and more weird. Something was aware of him differently, something that felt like the colder air that had swiped in to raise up her hairs. She thought of animals going wiry when they're backed into corners, as much as she thought of other things: his hair wet from the rain on that first evening when he tried scolding her Vespa into shape, and what theoretically predictable direction that happening might have clapped into if she'd been some other Dublin girl.

The alcohol still tinged in her throat. She wondered what kind of wily things the wet wind was doing to her curls. She met his eyes and was jolted by something equally reflective in them, deep and right against hers; it was like an impact and she startled into laughter. With the game dropped, he fell into it right along with her.

They went home.

Less than two years later, he made love to her.

It was with a fierce and slow mood that moved catlike into the room right under their noses and wrung them into each other. Cassie remembered their hands linked fist-like somewhere up on the armrest and how that seemed to press the point home, the precise recklessness of staying put inside of what had come over them.

She made a sudden sound at some point and Rob shuddered, somewhere in his shoulders but resonating everywhere. Surely she doesn't remember it right, but it was as if they knew in the moment they were tearing something up and burning it. As if some previously metaphorical, invisible pluck of music in him at the sound of her voice was now naked and moving through all of him against her, his mouth breathing half-drunk and sweet into her ear. Kissing along her forehead he unthinkingly mumbled, "Cass, Cass, _Cassie_ ," when she gasped and pulled hard against him in the short fitful wave.

She should have known that there would be power in it if this ever happened, with the way they made their own weather, with how well they knew each other, but then that was the immeasurable mistake: She never thought it would happen at all, and of course when it did it wasn't just irrevocable but good and trembling, enough that the absolute worst of it is was that she understood what he meant, in a cold sinking way, when he told her that nothing could ever be the same again.

The first couple rending weeks after Operation Vestal were the worst. Her tantrums were barbaric. A few memory-laden items wound up in the trash, and when none of it did any good she had to turn a few parts of her mind off completely.

But before that, she drearily accepted an invitation to go to Sam's sister's wedding, even though it being this one branch of his family guaranteed it would be a high-expense affair where in her current state she’d look like a zombie by comparison to everyone else. Something had made her remind herself that she did have that one dress and smudge some make-up over the discolored patches of her face before Sam picked her up, but the wedding was something she had little memory of later, and the now slightly loose dress pressed all kinds of uncomfortable things against her. She remembered Rob and "Lexie" on the deck, black mist of the ocean and the two of them pretending to flirt with each other, and she decided that they must have been the two biggest idiots on the face of the planet, and then finally got down to the business of forgetting him altogether.

It didn't work, not completely. She would wake up still with something both invisible and blinding pressing down on her and feel she must be back to where her same bedsit had had that calming color like sunshine waning through tissue paper rather than the betraying tricks of the light it seemed to have after she rearranged the furniture, and she'd slide into that morning after the Christmas party when Rob had dragged her in her drunk limp to where he gently dunked her to the futon and she immediately fell asleep.

In that rogue state of her mind upon first waking she was back to the sun lapping her awake and her first stirring sighs pulling his eyes over to her from where he sat with a mug of coffee and a rumpled dress shirt, watching more than looking. She felt like she would never be free of the awareness of those eyes watching her; that was the price of not fully noticing it at the time.

Over a cigarette, she wondered what she would do about it if the two of them ever had to be in the same room again; it was almost emotionless, developing some kind of emergency protocol.

She realized that probably she would just pretend to be Lexie again. She would act like she didn't know him at all.

 

It was a long drive to her place, a rather old, rather huge and properly enchanting house out at Wicklow. He didn't pull all the way up to the front, stopping the car in the shadows under a large swaying tree. He turned and cocked her an eyebrow. "Nice."

"Thanks." She sat there for a moment.

"...What is it?" he asked when he realized her hesitance to get out.

"I'm trying to think what I'm going to tell them about where I've been," she said, grudging him the explanation.

"Will they have been all that worried?" He thought it was strange, the way she'd worded her concern. Like her and her mates were a little too responsible for each other.

"Not worried. Not exactly."

He put his window down a couple inches and got into his pocket for a cigarette. After lighting it and taking a couple pulls, his gaze landed on the back of her neck as her head was looking away now into the rich and bristly surroundings. He hesitated a second, and then flipped open his lighter again, just to let a breath of light out between them. He hadn't seen her from this angle and of course it was impeccable, not a notch out of place from the real thing even if the haircut was a little different.

He clicked the lighter shut. A thick and whispering velvet of a silence happened, and his hand had thoughts of its own: He was noiselessly slipping it through the space between them, slowly, very slowly nudging for the back of her neck, for the smallest taste of that hair. It was some final test; it was something he had to know.

But she turned her head, and he sighed and let his hand rest on her shoulder, like that was somehow less foolish than letting his hand shoot back like a kid's caught in the cookie jar.

What she did surprised him: He felt the lighter tugged from the light grasp in his other hand before he could wonder why she leaned forward. Even though she could have hit the overhead light she flicked up a flame just as he'd done, and held it a little closer to him so that he could simply search her eyes searching his eyes for a probing moment. The persistent freakiness of the evening was winding down at this little castle of a house and he felt like he was hiding in some candle-lit cellar out of a gothic novel. She flicked the flame out and her dark face still peered at him; she asked, "Did you ever tell her?"

His mouth had gone dry. "Tell her what?"

He couldn't read her at all, not really, but he thought he knew what the tilt of her head meant.

A long moment passed. He said, "No."

She backed into her seat a little, and he figured that was it. He was looking for movement in one of the house's yellow windows when she lifted over and pulled lightly on the back of his neck and kissed him.

It was different this time, done for wrong and better reasons. He lit up and kissed back and shut his eyes. It could only last a short moment because he didn't dare breathe, knowing the spell would break the moment he let her scent in. His desire would no longer believe her. She seemed to finally pull back at just the right moment, leaving him speechless until he stammered, "You didn't have to..."

She was calm. She seemed strangely satisfied even, as she reached over for the door handle. "Thank you, by the way. Not just for letting me go, I mean...” She shrugged. “It’s been kind of fun."

"...Your accent." His head swirled into bright confusion just as she was slipping out of the seat. He shot forward to still be able to catch her face through the door. "What was that, Australian?”

Not even bothering with the coyness, she looked more like a crook in that moment than she had all night. Somehow warmed by the sheer insanity of it, he felt himself grinning.

"Are you Australian?"

"Good night, officer," she called down, in a clear Dublin voice again, and slammed the door.

 

 

There isn't exactly a handbook on how to handle something like the body of Lexie Madison.

Cassie caught up to this when it was weeks after Operation Mirror and they still didn't know, after everything, who exactly she was. She'd been seduced by the trickery of wrapping herself up in Lexie's dozenth life, almost convinced it had never been a mask, but when bureaucracy kicks in, everyone has to have a name. They could hardly bury her and put up a headstone, and the idea still prickled: the thought that a name she’d made up over biscuits and coffee in Frank’s office maintaining that branding importance for someone else was too chilling even now, but It made Cassie a little sad that she could never be sure, if taking up that final name may have been what Lexie would have actually wanted. Bodies do sometimes go unidentified for years, fridged indefinitely in the morgue and indifferent to their funerals that may never come. The question of Lexie was different: No funeral, not yet, but there were still people who needed to say goodbye.

In the end, somebody did put together a memorial service for quote-on-quote Lexie Madison, announced on the same day as the same newspaper column pleading for info on her identity. (Of course after all of Frank's baiting by saying her face would go in the paper as an anonymous dead girl if Cassie didn't play along with his idea, they still didn't know where she was from and it happened anyway. She'd already been thankful to get the voicemail when she rang to tell her aunt she was okay.) Lexie could never get a funeral for all of her lives, but if they ever found her family she might end up having a couple of them. Something about that made Cassie think of Snow White: that double life of a princess taking up in the savage forest and how as a kid she had always felt for those dwarves and the confused jealousy they might have had when some high-born stranger from afar awoke her from that coffin they'd crafted and then swept her quickly off.

When the article was released, Cassie felt on edge all day. She backed out of Sam's invitation to get dinner with a pile of paperwork she'd had to take home, but it was eleven that night before she even got around to thunking the folders onto the chest she still used as a coffee table and making some serious tea.

She kept fiddling with her phone, half-expecting at least a couple anxious text messages even though she knew the word might have gotten around that it wasn't really her. People shouldn't have known anything about the undercover operation, but when it was something so sensationally unprecedented, the rumor beast occasionally found some way to circle for the kill. By the time something this big was leaked to somewhere like the Murder Squad, it would have made out Lexie Madison to be her long-lost surgically separated Siamese twin or something equally outrageous. She wondered, though, if even the truth getting out would be reassuring enough. It was one thing to be told that Cassie had had a double walking around; actually seeing the picture was something else.

She jumped a little when the kettle started singing. After downing half a teacup in one go, she sat down and got to work, setting her phone off to the side like a table knife.

Hours later in bed she couldn't get to sleep, still ridiculously expecting the phone to ring.

He didn't call.

 

He hadn't known what to expect of his memory of that woman except that he would feel as if the whole thing had been a strong dream; instead she had remained too far at the front of his mind to even get to the point of seeming unreal.

Part of this could have been the little blooming bomb of the fact that she had a baby coming. A thing about that had needled right into him and wouldn't let go, something that spoke to deep indefinable envies of the roots other people could shrug into the ground beneath them. The details of that nameless girl faded, the way her voice and movements had been off from Cassie's, and after time they were grafted in with the light but sturdy bow note of his old partner's voice and the gentler shape of her haircut, his mind lazily supplying him with those stinging waves of memory.

He believed, with the baby and the house right out of a dusty romance and whatever good love she’d had going in her life, that she'd found the one place she could run to without getting spurred out again, by herself or anyone else. He'd been right, but the cruel joke was on him: He should have known better what that last place had to be.

On his day off he was attempting to eat something while picking up some therapeutically heavy read when Heather opened the door to his room. She usually knocked, but he didn't make anything of it at first. "What is it?" he asked.

"Have you seen...?" She swallowed and tried to start over. "There's this thing next to the obituary column, and..."

While she'd been stammering he'd realized the bad signs, her face pale and wiped free of its usual affected delicacies and the hand slightly clenching the newspaper. He started to stand up. "Jesus, Heather, what is it?"

"It's..." Heather wavered between shocked and pitying. "But she's been dead a while, and I know you would have heard about it if it was..."

And then he understood. He had the impulse to go over and snatch the paper out of her hands, but it would be denying that he already knew. His body tipped back until he was leaning into his bed frame, his hand clenching the wood that was still splintered in one place from the struggling gnaw of a handcuff. Her mouth in the dark wind outside of her old mansion had been warm as life; all he could hear was an echo of _dead a while_ and feel as if he was in the middle of a very bad joke.

"Don't get in a panic, okay," he finally said calmly enough. "There’s another girl who...It's not Cassie."

Unbeckoned and unfair, his head supplied him with Jamie's long-gone soft skin where he'd pressed his lips to her face; it was ages and ages ago and someone else and he thought, he'd never get used to it, the way it felt to have the pettiest of his gifts taken right to the grave like bad luck charms.

Heather must have had a hundred questions and he was hardly paying her any attention right then, but she surprised him by barely saying anything else to him about it. Rob was rubbing at his forehead with one hand and letting out a deep sigh when he made out that she was un-wrinkling the paper and setting it on his desk for him. "Well. If you know who she is, deary, you should give them a call."

At first he wondered if he would have to, but he couldn't think of any piece of information he'd pulled out of her that one night that would be crucial to an investigation; he wasn’t sure about that accent and it wouldn’t prove anything either way. And anyhow it was laughable to think he could dress it up to make it seem like he only just now realized that woman hadn't been Cassie and he hadn't been withholding something all this time. Being a good little floater, even when it made him grind his teeth, was all he had these days. It hadn't actually occurred to him until then that it might have reflected nicely on him if he'd arrested her after all, and he had barely even considered that option, aside from the brief urge to come down on her hard just as punishment for what she'd reminded him of.

The one thing he knew for sure about her that wasn't in the tentatively worded strip about "Lexie Madison" was the thing Cooper would have figured out.

What the paper gave was any and all useful information about her occupation and frequent whereabouts so that no one would be confused about whether they actually knew her at all. The resemblance between her and a Dublin detective was not mentioned, only the probably very confusing qualifier that "Victim was known for a time by the name Lexie Madison and is not Cassandra Maddox, who is living," to prevent an influx of useless ID calls from Cassie's old uni mates. It was a good enough picture that he was sure some people would be on the phone anyway without taking enough of a breather to let the words sink in.

Anyway, there it was. Cassie would know. And Rob thought it had to be more than that. He remembered the rumor about her returning to school to finish her degree, something about it now appearing in his mind with a false ring to it. He felt some tinge of connection to her which he realized might have been made of desperately sentimental thinking, but as half-formed and sad as the facts were, they were both irreversibly in on some secret.

 

 

On the Sunday he was almost too reluctant, but he ended up dragging himself to the small chapel after all, unable to help the notion that there was some kind of buried momentum that made him owe her the trouble.

He had taken the far left of one of the last pews and sat there for several minutes before bothering to observe the evidently small size of Lexie's social life. There were groups bunched together in the pews up and across the aisle from him that he was just deducing were probably students that had known Lexie from the academy, though from their shared hunched demeanor it seemed curiosity had gotten them here more than anything else.

He hadn't even wondered about the one other figure right across the aisle from him before he was getting into his jacket pocket to check how many cigarettes he'd have for the ride home, and there was some simultaneous, accidentally mirroring motion from his peripheral right. He looked over—same reflexive notice from the other bookend—and his eyes met Cassie's.

There was only widening, icy shock from both of them for a frozen moment, Rob's heart doing an excited slam beside his grim inability to even think what to do. And then finally, after what had felt much longer than its few seconds' time, her brows lowered to steel and she mouthed what would have been a flat burning demand of "What. Are you. _Doing_?"

In his haze of panic it took him an idiotic moment before he realized that for all Cassie knew this was some wildly inappropriate way he'd found to mourn for their partnership; this dawned on him all the more pathetically when he figured it would probably only make him out to be the self-centered fuckbucket of the century if he even tried to explain himself to her. They could have stayed like that, stilled like hackled cats, for God knows how long, if these other two hadn't arrived.

Splitting down the aisle between their stares was a short snub-nosed girl with some academy boy who looked like he could tap Hollywood levels of handsome on better days than this one. The guy caught more of Rob's attention; there was a surly swerve towards Cassie before the girl gave some motion of surprise and automatically reached for his arm, though there was something in both motions that made it seem like they could have already been discussing her from afar. Cassie was wearing a pair of lightly tinted sunglasses, obviously as some attempt to draw as little attention to the resemblance as possible, if there was any hope for that at all, and clearly here it hadn't worked. Rob wasn't looking for the reason to move in closer when he got it, the small sense of trouble that was already halfway to hooking him out of his seat. Cassie had noticed both of them, and she glanced towards the young man before looking down at her hands with a sigh.

The woman was hissing, "I _know_ , but try to let it go. Christ, this isn't the time. Between Justin being practically too catatonic to get out of bed and you—"

The other kid interrupted with a mocking, lazy laugh. A drunken sort of bitterness as he shook his arm out of the girl's grasp. She said something quick and harsh that sounded like it was just his name. Rob barely heard some low, more dangerous remark directed toward Cassie, who tried to fix him with some noncommittal response. It had been so long since he'd heard her voice and he almost didn't recognize it, purred respectfully low and something weirdly pleading in it that he couldn't figure out. He’d picked up quickly that these two weren't simply taken aback to see the resemblance: They'd already known she existed.

He was right over the man's shoulder by now, and heard: "Your lot don't know when to fuck off."

"Is there some problem here?" Rob asked, affecting both caution and impatience. Cassie didn't so much as flinch at his interruption. This was about as much as he got from the other two.

Cassie looked over at the guy for only a second. She looked pale. "I'm sorry about what happened, that's all it is, Rafe—"

The use of his name seemed to have set him off hard, Rob feeling it as the noiseless growl hit the air.

"...talking to me like you—" Rafe lunged forward right into the clap of Rob gripping him back by the arm. He didn't think the kid would have really done anything, but he gave him a stern look and let him go with a slight shove, making the gesture subtle enough to not draw the attention of the whole church. "Find a seat, yeah?" he said.

"Leave it," Cassie said tiredly.

This was chewed on immediately by Rafe, who scowled and demanded, "What, are you a pig too? One of your friends, Miss Undercover?"

"He's nothing to do with me," Cassie said, suddenly irritated enough with everyone that she just fixed her glare forward.

"Don't worry about him," the young woman said, fixing a squinting look at Rob and pulling at Rafe's arm. "I think I've seen him before."

Rafe looked him up and down, and his realization earned Rob a sort of respect that turned his mockery more harmless. "That guy she picked up at Copper's one or two weeks before? You could be the type."

"That was me." Rob hadn't looked for Cassie's reaction to any of this; it was easier to wonder at the too-interested way Rafe was scrutinizing him, and he uncomfortably clarified, "I...never slept with her, if that matters to anyone."

And now he heard a sharp stab of grim laughing that was Cassie, and he realized from the reactions of all three that he'd at least hinted at his awareness of the pregnancy by simply feeling the need to give such a detail; that may have even been the point when Cassie started to believe it, wasn't able to assume Rob was just stepping in to drag these kids off of her with some convenient story.

Like the gradual return of hearing after getting off an airplane, the chapel around them popped back into existence: some inspirational speaker entering with a bible after being stuck in traffic, murmurings from students up ahead, and the quiet sad shock of Lexie's friends. The first who spoke was the young woman, looking at Rafe and frowning. "I told you it was true."

Whoever this Rafe was or had been to the woman, he looked—Rob felt bad for him—like he couldn't summon anything more than a petulant, sullen disappointment under the half-sudden weight of this, and he turned away. When Rob made himself look back at Cassie she looked struck right through like a dropped piano, her eyes wide with blaring thoughts but staring at nothing.

The girl seemed to take this sedation for the opportunity to give Rafe a push that made him finally cast one last dark look Cassie's way before stepping down the aisle. The girl looked back at her too, seemed to consider saying something more articulately unforgiving, but then just sighed, turned and kept walking. Rob of course could only stand, stunned and confused by all this, before his ears caught Cassie's motions and he flinched enough of a glance to see her getting up and leaving.

He almost didn't follow her, and when he did after a couple minutes he thought he'd missed her. But when he was slowing to button up his jacket, frowning in the little echoey welcome center, he realized she'd just rounded the corner behind him. With a sighing pat of his arms falling to his sides, he stood there in a slouch, kicked at some ball of paper somebody had left on the floor with the tip of his shoe. She appeared next to him and their eyes locked to each other, still holding some stubborn heat, the last embers of a dying fire.

Finally, Cassie spoke in a slight groan. "What the _hell_? What's the story?"

He gave a weak shrug. "She was the one who came up to me, if you can believe it."

She let out a small, overwhelmed laugh, not a happy laugh.

"So...of course I figured that was strange," he said, then was stalling. He recalled, speaking slowly, "'Miss Undercover.'...What was that all about?"

"She pretended to be me, didn't she? With you?" Now this could have almost been funny, the obvious blaze in her eyes, like she could have dragged Lexie out of the grave and punched her for this. "Christ. How long did it take till you made her?"

He gave her a scoffing look: _Give me a tiny bit of credit here._ "Not too long. I gave her some trouble like I was going to arrest her, but...I didn't." His voice dipped into a slightest bit of wavering as he added, “She’d probably be alive now if I had brought her in.”

Cassie's lashes were a slow flick in the dusty light set off by the huge old window above the main entrance. She looked like she was only now beginning to believe any of that had actually happened. She slowly said, "And so you came here...because you're sad that she's dead."

Her voice was incredulous and possibly full of a very complicated kind of guilt. He had to stop himself from making some consoling assurance.

"They were right. I shouldn't have shown up here; I almost didn't, but then I..." She was backing up on her feet a little and shaking her head. The sour way she said it made him fully realize that other dimension to her anger; this had been the last thing she'd wanted him to sully with any of his presence, maybe one of the few monumental fixtures of her professional history that, aside from some punchy game of pretend next to the sea spray back in their shared days, had no link to him in her memory. Realizing that he'd had enough of a good reason to be there after all had snuffed out her fury and left it dull and bitter. She wanted to prick the old thorns thatched up in the air between them just for the sake of expressing this somehow, and maybe this was why she said with a familiar gravel of exhausted anger, "Please tell me it had nothing to do with me that you decided to let her go."

"Well," Rob hedged, "she did tell me she was pregnant."

Unwavering, she squinted at him. "Yeah, and was that the reason?...What really _happened_ , anyway?"

He was scathingly curious too, of course, about the things she could disclose to him: he didn't know what the hell that had been between her and Lexie’s crowd. There was something soft and dangerous in the room now, and he snatched it from the air fast, in spite of his knowledge that it was no fair bargain, in spite of how it erased any nobility there might have been in his decision to let Lexie walk; he couldn't care. "I'll tell you for a pint."

The spell couldn't have lasted more than a small moment: Her face fell back to its self-numbing, impersonal frown. She looked back at him, then looked down to get her cigarettes out of her pocket, ready to light one on her way out the door. "You know I can't."

He should have tried to say it then, how sorry he was, but the longer such an unpredictable sort of apology goes unspoken the bigger it gets; if he'd understood this a long time ago, if he had known it was a choice between this ugly guilt growing slowly along his whole life and something else, something warmer he couldn't take back, would he have made the other choice? He wondered if that was the answer Lexie gave herself in the end, if it wasn't as simple as the friends, the baby. Cassie flicked her lighter closed at the threshold of the heavy church door, and Rob was still rooted heavily to where he'd been standing when she walked out.

It had started raining by the time he was heading to the car. The slow tap picked up to a downpour in the couple minutes after he was behind his wheel, thinking, unable to quite put it in drive and go home. He sat there for some long smudge of time with the water moaning outside, and a knock on the passenger side glass brought him out of his private fog to let down the window, expecting some neighborly guy would be telling him his back light was out. He leaned a bit down to look out the window.

In that second he thought of a dozen things at once: little girls splashing through puddles in red wellies, the tinsel of snow and rain catching on someone's eyelashes when you're close enough to notice, music next to the fireplace, Lexie leaning to him in the dark with an impossible mouth. His partner passing a thermos that was glowing warm against his glove, soft curls that seemed to reach for his fingers; and maybe for once, with blaring clarity, the moment of his life that he was living right in that instant.

She was looking down and shivering as she said, "The Vespa won't start."

His heart not trusting, halfway to breaking, he only stared back for a second before saying, "Get in."


End file.
